After decades of unwavering support for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, it seems Western leaders can no longer avert their gaze from the horrific televised images of mass carnage and starvation in Gaza and brutality on the West Bank.

In recent weeks, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Israel’s actions “appalling” and “intolerable”; German Chancellor Frederick Merz said Israel’s conduct was “beyond comprehension”; Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denounced Israel’s actions as “completely unacceptable”; and most recently Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway have jointly imposed sanctions on Israel’s far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

But despite their performative outrage and meaningless gestures, these world leaders are not neutral observers to the genocide in Gaza – they are direct participants in Israel’s monstrous war crimes, providing them with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover to carry out their massacre.

Led by the US, the volume of weapons supplied to Israel’s war machine is staggering.

From the time of its founding in 1948, Israel, a country with only seven million Jewish inhabitants, has received more than US$318 billion in mostly military aid from the US. Since 7 October 2023, the US Government has approved more than US$17.9 billion for Israeli military operations, and this, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, is “only a fraction of the full value of US support for this war".

The deadly arsenal includes every piece of military equipment from the 2000-pound bombs that have atomised Palestinian bodies and turned Gaza to rubble to the F-35 jet fighters that drop them.

And while the US is in the lead, with Germany running second (supplying 30% of Israel’s arms), the global supply chain for the parts and components of these weapons involves almost every European state plus Canada and Australia – from the bomb release mechanisms for the F-35 fighter jet to the engines for Israel’s Thunder B drones.

These weapons are vital for Israel to carry out its assault on Gaza; without them, even top Israeli officials acknowledge, the war would come to a halt. But the massacre goes on.

And as Israel carries out what the International Court of Justice determined is “probable genocide”, the suppliers of these weapons are in violation of the UN Arms Trade Treaty as well as the Rome Statute and the Geneva Convention which all prohibit the sale of weapons or weapons parts to countries carrying out war crimes.

But the Western contribution to Israel’s war machine goes further than the supply of weapons – along with the missiles and bombs they provide the electronic signals intelligence (SIGINT) that guides them to their targets.

This takes their participation beyond complicity to becoming accomplices or direct participants in genocide.

“It’s one thing to provide arms that can be used for a variety of purposes and a variety of targets,” said Brian Finucane, senior adviser in the US program at the International Crisis Group. “But if you’re providing actionable intelligence on a specific individual, and that individual happens to be civilian…potential law of war violations is much tighter.”

Since October, 2023, the US military has been flying MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip to provide tactical signals intelligence to the IDF. The MQ-9 is equipped with multi-spectral targeting systems, laser rangefinders and radar, enabling it to collect detailed information about targets on the ground that is shared with the Israel Defence Force.

In one example, the US collected and passed on signals intelligence claiming that Palestinian militants operated out of hospitals in Gaza, including an assessment that Hamas operated a “command and control node” under al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The horrific scenes culminating in the bombing of al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024, in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed, was livestreamed to the world.

But the US is not alone in sharing tactical intelligence with Israel’s military.

According to an investigation by Declassified UK, the Royal Air Force (RAF) has conducted at least 518 surveillance flights over Gaza since December 2023. The flights are carried out by the Shadow R1 aircraft that are equipped with electronic surveillance and satellite communication capabilities. Suspiciously, 15 of these flights were conducted in the lead-up to Israel’s attack on Rafah on 12 February 2024, which killed at least 67 Palestinians.

“If intelligence gathered by the RAF was used to facilitate war crimes,” writes Iain Overton of Declassified UK, “the UK could itself be liable under the Rome Statute of the ICC.”

This intelligence network, however, reaches wider than the UK and US. Both Britain’s squadron of Shadow R1 spy aircraft and America’s MQ-9 Reaper drones depend on a global satellite communications network centred largely at Pine Gap in Central Australia. The Pine Gap spy base is part of Five Eyes, a worldwide intelligence-sharing alliance made up of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US.

“After collecting and analysing the communications and intelligence data for the US’ National Security Agency [and the UK’s national signals intelligence agency GCHQ], Pine Gap is providing it to the Israel Defence Forces, as it steps up its brutal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza enclave,” writes Australian investigative journalist Peter Cronau.

“It’s thanks to the Pine Gap base, with its satellites so strategically positioned to monitor the Middle East region, along with its targeting and analysis capability, that Israel is able to make use of these benefits.”

There is little question that the US, Europe and Australia are in violation of international laws that prohibit the supply of arms and intelligence to countries carrying out or likely to be carrying out genocide.

According to international law expert Bruce Fein, “The United States has clearly become a co-belligerent with Israel in its war against Hamas-Gaza Palestinians by systematically supplying the IDF with weapons and intelligence without conditions.”

The implications of this are consequential: “[the US] has knowledge of a plausible genocide being committed in the territory since at least January 2024,” writes Pakistani international lawyer Abdullah Mohsin, “This may render the US internationally responsible for not merely failing to prevent genocide but also being an accomplice to the crime of genocide in Gaza.”

Despite the mounting evidence of their participation in Israel’s genocide, however, Western leaders hide behind the cover that they are unaware of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But the International Criminal Court is clear – ignorance does not absolve them of responsibility; individuals can be prosecuted regardless of whether or not they knew that genocide was being carried out.

In a sane and just world, we would see the leaders of the US, UK, Germany, Australia and beyond sitting collectively facing war crimes charges in the dock at The Hague. For now, we know that their pronouncements of shock and indignation and their feeble sanctions are less about ending Israel’s genocidal war than assuaging their consciences and gaslighting the rest of us into believing they did something during the holocaust in Gaza.

As was blindingly clear from day one, the only way to stop the genocide is to stop the flow of weapons and intelligence sharing, something Western leaders — beholden to the Israel lobby, arms manufacturers and the disastrous Zionist project — remain incapable of doing.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.